In this video, I'm going to show you how to set up Google Alerts for passive link prospecting,
brand building, and more knowledge bombs.
Stay tuned.
[music]
What's up marketers?
Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research
your competitors and dominate your niche.
Now, today is all about smart and passive marketing through web monitoring.
Now, rather than having to search for outreach prospects, whether that’s for collaborations,
links, or guest posting opportunities, you can get them emailed to you without lifting
a finger using Google Alerts.
And the same goes for some other marketing opportunities too.
Let's get started.
Google Alerts is a super simple tool to use.
In fact, I can show you how to set up a Google Alert in 20 seconds.
First, go to google.com/alerts and type in your search query.
Next, check out the alert preview to make sure it matches what you want to be notified
about and click on the “show options” dropdown to further customize your alert settings.
So I’ll set the language to English, and choose to receive all results.
Then click the “create alerts” button and you’re done.
Now, anytime a web page matches your search query, Google will send you an email notification
that looks like this.
But there are 3 things that you need to know about Google Alerts.
The first one: if you don't use Google search operators, your inbox will likely get filled
with a ton of irrelevant results.
The second thing is that Google doesn't send content that has already been published.
So they're only gonna send you new content alerts.
And the third thing: as far as our tests have gone, Google Alerts does not send you every
page that's in their index.
Meaning, you're gonna miss out on a ton of perfectly good opportunities.
In fact, we put Ahrefs to the test and found that on average, our tool produced 2,376%
more results than Google for the exact same queries.
So let's jump into some smart tactics to get only or at least mostly relevant results that
are going to be worth your time.
The first alert will help you find an unlimited and completely passive stream of guest posting
opportunities.
A couple common search operators used in Google to find guest posting opportunities are [topic]
intitle:"write for us" and [topic] intitle: "become a contributor."
But the frequency of new "write for us" pages that are published each day is likely more
infrequent than actual guest posts that are published.
And remember, Google Alerts isn't going to send you historical data.
But we can actually get very relevant results very frequently using the footprint, "guest
post by."
To keep things super targeted, you can use the intitle operator and enter your topic,
then type in "guest post by" as a phrase match.
So if I have a blog on supplements, then I would type:
intitle:supplements + "guest post by".
And if you look at the results preview, look how targeted these results are.
Since we're looking strictly for articles with the word "supplements" in the title,
you could expand this search by adding more intitle: parameters.
So if you have a large team of guest writers, you might do a search like this:
intitle:supplements or intitle:vitamins or intitle:"protein powder"
or intitle:nutrition + "guest post by".
And you can see that the results are still very relevant, but you'll get a lot more results
since you're broadening the search query with multiple categories.
To get historical results, you can run a unique query inside Ahrefs' Content Explorer.
Just type in: author:"guest" and then within parentheses type ("link building" or "keyword
research" or "search engine optimization" or "whatever topics you write about").
Next, we'll set the one article per domain filter since we don't need to pitch the same
website twice.
And you'll see a nice list of websites that are clearly accepting guest posts.
As a side note, our Alerts tool and Content Explorer share the same database, so you could
set this query as a mentions alert and get new guest posting opportunities sent straight
to your inbox.
The next alert is to monitor your brand for unlinked mentions.
This one's easy.
Just type in your brand name and variations of your brand name within parentheses
separated by the or search operator.
So for us, that might be ahrefs or ahref or a hrefs or aherfs.
Next, type in -site:ahrefs.com -site:twitter.com and you can exclude any other social media sites.
The minus site colon part tells Google to ignore mentions from our website, ahrefs.com
as well as a few social media networks since we're not interested in social monitoring
for this example.
Then I'll check the settings and make sure that the frequency is set to once a day,
only pages in English, and I want Google to send me all of the results.
We have a great blog post with a few more tactics on unlinked mentions, so I'll leave
a link to that in the description.
The next alert is to monitor questions in your niche.
Using the site: operator, you can monitor an entire website for any search query.
For example, if you're in the travel niche, you might want to monitor Trip Advisor.
And if you're targeting programmers, then you might watch Stack Overflow.
Or if you're looking for questions on general topics, then you might want to monitor Quora.
Here's how it's done.
Type in a keyword that you want to monitor, so for us, that might be "SEO."
Then we'll add site:quora.com.
Now, any time "SEO" is mentioned on Quora, we'll be notified
by email so we can jump in, answer and help out.
You can also do this with brand mentions.
If you look on quora, you'll see that there are quite a few question about Ahrefs.
So we could create another Alert that monitors mentions of our brand name
simply by replacing the word SEO with Ahrefs.
While this is great for getting to new questions quick, you won't know whether the questions
will ever gain any traction.
So a cool hack to find posts on forums that are getting organic traffic is to look up the
forum in Site Explorer.
So I'll look up quora.com.
Next, I'll go to the top pages report, which shows us the pages on Quora that get organic
traffic in descending order.
Now, if I had a website on finance, then I would type that in here.
And now you can see related pages on Quora that get organic search traffic,
and you can decide which ones are worth your time.
The next alert is to get free press and links from journalists.
Being a journalist is tough.
And it's best if I show you an example.
A little while ago, I was reading an article about Cinnamon.
And I found some critical errors in the post, so I sent the journalist an email, told her about them
and here’s what she said:
"Thank you so much!
I'll see if I can talk to my editor about this.
I usually cover animals, but was required to write the cinnamon article in less than
an hour."
Now, I am by no means a cinnamon expert, but the keyword term that I was monitoring was
related, which resulted in a deep link from a powerful website.
Here's how you can set up a Google Alert to find opportunities just like this.
Within parentheses, I'll type in (site:nytimes.com or site:time.com or site:fastcompany.com
or site:huffingtonpost.com), and you could obviously add more or less depending on your
needs.
Then type in a topic that you want to monitor, so that might be "search engine optimization."
Now anytime one of these sites mentions this keyword phrase, I'll be sent a notification
where I can chime in.
But here's the thing.
Journalists, they publish
and then they move on to the next story.
So that means that getting them to add a link to your website or mention your company
in a published article will likely be much more challenging than having them feature you in
a future post.
So rather than trying to get them to replace the article, try and build a relationship
with them and be a source for years to come.
The next alert is to monitor your competitors
And there are so many competitor monitoring tactics that you can use that are just...
They're super powerful.
So let's say that we wanna monitor mentions of Backlinko.
We can just type in:
Backlinko -site:backlinko.com to exclude any mentions from his website.
And without even clicking through to these articles, you can see exactly what the context
of these articles are about.
But you can expand this query by including key people within the company.
In this case, we would just change it to Backlinko or "Brian Dean" -site:backlinko.com.
Now this alert will help you keep a close watch on your competitors' link building strategies
and key relationships.
And you could also monitor websites that are doing reviews on your competitors.
For example, if you had a new software company that offered an interactive website builder,
you could search for "squarespace" intitle:"review".
And from here you can contact authors and website owners, offer free accounts and ask them to
review your software.
The next alert will help you find NAP citation opportunities for your local SEO efforts.
A big part of local SEO are NAP citations, which stands for name, address, and phone
number.
And there are thousands of directories out there where you can add your own structured citations,
but your competitors are going to keep building them.
So using Google Alerts, you can keep an eye on your competitors and monitor new citations
that they're building.
Just set up an alert with this query:
"Competitor's name" + "competitor phone" + "competitor address".
First, Google the company name and look at the information from their Google My Business listing.
Next, I'll copy their business name, a part of their address that should be consistent
across their citations, and the better portion of their phone number without the area code.
And right away, you’ll see a bunch of your competitor's local citations in the preview.
So you can expect to get new alerts like these and then jump on them.
The next alert is to monitor for theft of your digital products.
So if you sell an online course, you probably don’t want people stealing it.
In fact, this happened to our course, "Blogging for Business," which has now been removed.
To keep an eye on the pirates, you can type in something like:
Ahrefs + "blogging for business" + and then within parentheses, we'll add some common
footprint keywords like download or torrent, then we'll exclude our site, ahrefs.com.
You can do the same for ebooks, but with a slight modification.
For example, if we wanted to monitor for PDF copies of "Digital Marketing For Dummies,"
we could type in the title of the book as a phrase match, then add keywords like (Free
or Download) and then add filetype:pdf, which will look for only PDFs.
The next alert is a great way to find interview opportunities.
Here's the thing with content creation.
A typical video or blog post on our channels takes around 20 hours to create.
But an interview?
Max, one hour, plus the host does all of the promoting for you.
So you can set up an alert using a query like this:
Interview and "Tim Soulo" or someone who gets interviewed frequently that you can monitor.
Then click on "show options" and set the source to "video," since a lot of podcasters will
create a second copy for YouTube.
And you'll see that the results are quite relevant.
Now, it's just a matter of pitching the host on why you should be interviewed and sharing
some unique insights that their audience would love.
Now when you're using these alerts, make sure to check the preview, or if you're finding
that you're not getting enough results, then compare the results with Ahrefs' Alerts
and Content Explorer.
Now, make sure to subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials, and I'd love
to hear from you about your go-to Google Alerts.
So keep grinding away, create some nice passive SEO alerts, and I'll see you in the next tutorial.